Tencent

3 results arranged by date

1. Beyond censors' reach, free expression thrives, to a point

By Sophie Beach

On March 24, 2012, investigative journalist Yang Haipeng posted on his Sina Weibo microblog a story he had heard that alleged a link between Neil Heywood, an English businessman who had been found dead in a Chongqing hotel, and Bo Xilai, the powerful Chongqing Communist Party chief. His post is widely recognized as the first significant public mention of a connection between the two men and it spread like wildfire online before being deleted the next day. A month later, Yang’s Sina Weibo account, which had 247,000 followers, was shut down.

In the next three months, users of China's microblog weibo.com --- "weibo" is the generic Chinese
term for Twitter-like platforms --- run by the huge sina.com (the English site is here) news
portal, entertainment and blogging site, will have to start providing their
real-world identities to the site, instead of simply being able to register. It
seems likely the users of competitor tencent.com (English here) will have to do
the same, though the government
hasn't made that clear in recent announcements, dating back to December 16.

Tags:

In the latest sign of increasing pressure on Chinese
companies to tighten control of the Internet, Chinese authorities convened an
unusual seminar in Beijing for senior executives of 39 major enterprises
involved in Internet services, technology and telecommunications.